Written, designed and created entirely by the students of the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, Privo sarò del cielo e de l’infernorenews the successful collaboration between La Biennale di Venezia and the Venetian Conservatory. The title, which refers to the libretto by Alessandro Striggio used by Monteverdi for his Orfeo, is a tribute to the composer from Cremona.

A native of Thrace, Orpheus incarnates the chtonian connotation in a land of shamans, masters of the hermetic philosophy that acts as a mediator between the world of the living and the world of the dead by provoking a state of trance through music, techne that imprisons and seduces quite like the fruit eaten by Persephone. Music is the body destroyed and fragmented (the body torn apart by the inebriated Bacchantes) and devoured by Orpheus, a living patchwork of decadence and regeneration. It is also the lost body of Eurydice, a private desire for the capacity to dilate the Self and condemned to impossibility: Euridice’s phasma, the symbol of the inadequacy of the word/poetry to understand reality. The world can only be understood through superior forms of eros but Orpheus’ eros is as false as his logos: Orpheus is an anti-hero who penetrates into Hades in living form but does not have the courage to die for love: no heavens of heroic redemption, no hell of persisting guilt. Nothing but the space of a glance, and the loss of self. Eternally doomed to the instant of his own irreversibiity, Orpheus is the first to experience the contemporary condition.

To celebrate the διαιρεσις/διατομη of Orpheus’ body thrown into the river Evros, a patchwork opera of mobile instrumental fragments, immersed (dispersed) in an electronic amniotic liquid (Marco Marinoni).